Learning approaches studied on newly introduced exam problems

Abstract

The courses students experience first in higher education can set the stage for their future understanding of the subject matter and their choice between a surface or deep approach to learning. Building a good foundation in these areas early on is vital. In this work we study how students learn new problems depending on their learning approach, by focusing on first-semester student performance in linear algebra exams with a newly introduced problem type. We find that by providing prior exams, performance on new problems quickly increases before saturating at a high level. This performance improvement is especially evident for students following a deep approach to learning. While this can suggest that students objectively understand the given sub-topic better, the access to prior exams can also promote a shallow learning approach in a memorization-based examination.